Valérie-Anne Mahéo's postdoctoral research focuses on the multiple influences of political socialization. The objective is to assess experimentally the impact of a civic education workshop on students political development, and to examine whether children can have bottom-up influences on their parents. She further investigates whether these socialization influences vary in different family contexts, based on the socio-economic status and immigration status of families. For this research, she conducted a randomized field experiment in 38 elementary schools in Quebec, and surveyed 2,500 students and their parents in the fall of 2017.
Her doctoral research examined the causal link between education and political participation. Many cross-sectional studies have established a positive relationship between individual education and political participation. However, more recent quasi-experimental and longitudinal studies have questioned the causality of this relationship. She found that the effect of education on participation is not the same for the socio-economically advantaged and the disadvantaged individuals. In fact, socio-economically disadvantaged individuals prove to reap more political benefits from university education than the more socio-economically advantaged ones. She also investigated the political effects of a voting aid application and found that different groups of citizens benefited in different ways from such voter education tool.